I decided just now, since it is still the 1st of November and there are a couple hours left of the day..... I am going to give NaBloPoMo a shot again this year. I do realize this may mean some lame-o posts, but I am hopeful I will be able to avoid that by being a bit creative.

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So, we're in Ohio, visiting my extended family of origin. It's been a lovely few days. It's fall, so the weather is pretty crazy - on the way here Wednesday, the girls and I rode through a snowstorm for more than 2 hours through the mountains in Pennsylvania. We definitely missed the view of the brilliant foliage - something even the girls had been looking forward to. The girls and I had lunch with one of my college friends and her tiny daughter one day, then last night we joined another college friend and her family for trick-or-treating.

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One of the things that I thought of last night, sitting at my friend's parents' dining table... God has always been there for me - even when I didn't know it. This family invited me over quite a bit in the months after my Dad died. I hadn't known them very long, had been friends with their daughter less than one year. And yet? They frequently invited me to come over for dinner, to study there, family dinners.... Kind of strange, since I technically lived at "home". But these folks sensed that I no longer had a home - at least not one that helped me feel cared for or loved. And they did. It's weird. All these years (fourteen), I never really gave much thought to what this family did for me during a time of great need. It wasn't my own extended family that knew how to comfort me - they were dealing with their own grief. And God knew that I needed a place where I was cared for and prayed for - even if I didn't see it that way at the time. And He so graciously gave me a place - a friend who's family simply did what they could to offer a haven.

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And I so appreciate it. I was overwhelmed at that table last night, as my friend sat next to me, one of her sisters across from me, another in the kitchen - our children swirling around us in costumes and fingers covered in paint, the blue dripping from one pumpkin. Overwhelmed because there are moments still that I feel like the grieving girl from fourteen years ago - I hardly feel like I've grown up, and yet I have. My family of origin is finally (mostly) recovered and I have become a woman. A woman who still misses her Dad, especially when I'm here, where I spent my life with him. But I am a woman, a wife, a mother... And I think that I am so much better at those parts of me after being loved by my various friends and their families throughout the years.